WARBURG REVISITED: Part two (English)

Warburg 2.0
“Warburg was a technophile. He was interested in telecommunication, the press and travelling; all these new technologies enabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migration that connected civilizations from the beginning.”
Mathias Bruhn – Aby Warburg (1866-1929): The Survival of an Idea

In Part 1 of this article published in Le CENTQUATREVUE we saw the cultural worldview ripening to welcome back Warburg’s avant-garde ideas 70 years after their conception. If he was alive today, taking a quantum leap through time and space and technology, what would his project be?

Warburg wanted to break down disciplinary boundaries, allowing meaning and ideas to flow freely across academic and ethnic cultures, across geography and history, and particularly, across value systems. His procedural technique required the meticulous collection, storage and tagging of randomly accessed archives of various sources and media. He tried, with relatively limited success, to keep snapshots of the relationships themselves that he found between cultural elements.

Today, the medium most capable of transcending all these boundaries while holding practically infinite relational data about its content, is obviously the world wide web, and in particular in its so-called “Web2.0” incarnation.

Web2.0 has many definitions. Our interest here is for those that relate to the recent trend in internet services becoming more collaborative, more accessible, and more open – in particular thanks to the use of new paradigms such as shared tagging of metadata, folksonomies, community moderation, and social networking.

Many of these information sharing paradigms started from a commercial need to provide, on one hand, reader and user reviews for books and goods sold online, and on the other for a virtual marketplace where anyone could sell to anyone (e.g. ebay, amazon.com). Then, with the explosion of fast broadband internet connections, new services encouraging the online storage and sharing of multimedia appeared.

Flickr.com, was one of the first and still is the most successful image sharing sites, where users can actually upload any of their images and “tag” them with metadata that would help others find the images. Another feature allows other users to add comments under the images, and more interestingly, to highlight zones within the images and annotate them. Recently Flickr added the capacity to upload and share videos as well, placing it in direct competition with YouTube (acquired by Google for a record 1.6 billion dollars!).

The success of Flickr and YouTube has spawned many complementary services allowing for the upload, annotation, and sharing of other types of media, from favourite links (delicious.com) to documents (a.nnotate.com), from slideshows (slideshare.com) to data sets (swivel.com).

Warburg’s project was infinitely ambitious, and proportionally optimistic. He had the correct reflex of setting up an institution to carry it on (the university then the library in Hamburg, the KWB). Between 1921 and 1929, work progressed surely if slowly, with two associates (namely Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing) and a handful of assistants. He had probably not anticipated spending four of these years in a psychiatric ward, even less dying so early in 1929, or the urgent need to salvage what he had put together by shipping it all to London away from the rise of Nazism in 1933. Of the KWB only 60,000 books and 20,000 photographs have thus survived.

70 years later, even the Warburg Electronic Library (WEL) project pales in comparison to the Google Book Search (GBS). GBS is a project launched in 2004, aiming to make the full text of books searchable (and of course cross-referentiable) online, from any computer anywhere in the world. By 2007, GBS had scanned 1,000,000 books and continues to grow at the stupendous rate of 3,000 books a day. Meanwhile, Flickr has passed the 2 billion photos mark in 2007 and is growing at a rate of 3,000 uploaded images a minute, while Youtube gobbles 13 hours of video uploaded every minute of every day!

According to Bruhn, for Warburg, “folklore belonged (as so-called low art) to the same cosmos of art historical style analysis as high art” and “pamphlets enabled people across Europe to share a common Leidschatz, the common treasure of elementary passions and gestures.” In the world of Web2.0, the tug-o-war continues in blogs vs traditional journalism vs literature, science vs popular lore, in encyclopedias vs wikipedias…

Beyond media sharing, Web2.0 is characterised by the growth of bottom-up and horizontal sources of information, the “any to many” (blogs and podcasts) and “many to many” (wikis, digg) model of knowledge transmission. Wikipedia, designed as the first collaborative “free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit”, is now the number one source of knowledge on the internet, with around 2.5 million articles in the English language alone. Despite constant criticism, it is precisely its openness that allows “false” information to be
moderated out by the community.

Warburg seemed fascinated by the notion of transmission of ideas and its complementary notion of evolution. By examining the moments of hybridization and mutation, he found the essential, generic idea behind the symbol, behind the thought and the action. By looking for the nodes, he reached the roots of cultural trees. His work was that of a forensic detective, and it was a work that would require much more time and resources than his short life had allowed.

His constantly moving organisation of the library’s content in response to his own intuitions and assumptions was hard to perpetuate beyond his death. When it stopped being his semi-private almost personal library, the limitations of this flexible and anarchistic method were quickly exposed as public access to thousands of volumes became a daily requirement.

Imagine instead the power of a self-regulating community of millions of lay people and experts selecting, tagging, reviewing, annotating, commenting, collating, and sharing information on digital versions of the images and texts (both yahoo and google have figured the use of that, see Mechanical Turk and Image Labeler). Such a magma of relational data would be an infinite well of information for someone like Warburg to interpret and extract patterns from. Imagine if he had access to some of the wonderful data visualisation tools available today (digg labs, Hans Rosling on statistics, the excellent gapminder.org, and IBM’s brand new Many Eyes ), what would his Bilderatlas look like…

While the entire KWB library was in continuous mutation during its existence in Hamburg, it quickly became a somehow more classical system once in London. To use a quantum worldview image – from a superposition of potential states in constant flux, it collapsed into a single state reality once an external observer was present. To use another notion from the Web2.0 lore, Warburg’s library was in “perpetual beta” – beta phase being synonym in the IT and software development world to testing phase, or “use at your own risk” phase.

As a library structure, Warburg’s system remained little more than a glorified taxonomy that allowed for a fresher cross-referencing of resources by delivering them from the strictly vertical hierarchy of traditional library classification systems. Unfortunately it remained a closed system with the tags vocabulary set by the librarians themselves (in particular the quadrithematic Image, Word, Orientation, and Practice), limiting at one point or another the addition of new layers of meaning and of value, except in a top-down, and hence biased, version.

In contrast, an open tagging system (such as delicious.com) allows for infinite layers of meaning and relationships to be introduced on top of the data. What regulates this is the rules of statistical distribution that will ensure that the most common, or most frequent “tags” are those that float up to the surface, while more obscure tags, or those that haven’t coalesced yet, would remain dormant in wait for their cultural moment to come.

A “tag cloud” is a visual representation of the most common tags or words in a data set, weighed by frequency: it acts as a snapshot of a particular culture or interest. By adding historical data to a tag cloud, and using a data visualization service such as Google’s recent acquisition Motion Chart, it becomes possible to chart the development of a cultural interest over time. There are even web services, such as Wordle.net that help create and share graphically interesting tag clouds. Parts 1 and 2 of this text are represented in separate tag clouds below.

Collections of tags chosen by end users rather than librarians for example are generally referred to as folksonomies. As an anthropological tool, the study of folksonomies is interesting in that it directly reflects the vocabulary of a particular group of users – allowing for example the emergence of “ethnoclassification” systems (e.g. Adam Mathes).

Finally one of the most important aspects of Web2.0 is the concept of social networks, which capitalise on the idea that people of similar interests will flock together and form virtual communities with their own sub-culture. When you think about Warburg’s particular interest in the dynamics of social exchange, it is easy to imagine him delving into Facebook data, or better yet, creating his own social networks around particular subject matters at Ning and analysing their patterns.

The amount of data and information, the amount of knowledge in general, has of course grown exponentially in the last 100 years. Yet the exponential growth of knowledge is a constant since the dawn of human civilisation. What is particular to our own moment in history is the unprecedented accessibility of information, in spite of its quantity. And what is exciting about Web2.0 is the tools it has provided for us to sift through that information and access it in a usable way.

One particular company has used that as its mission statement since its foundation: according to its corporate website, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.” It is not clear to what end this organisation is happening (except of course to make ever more money) – but it has lead Google Inc. to create the world’s most powerful search system, indexing billions of web pages, millions of books, of images, and of videos. It has access to billions of email messages and blog entries; it has created extraordinary free mapping tools, and has even acquired 3D modelling software companies to let anyone create and share virtual architecture.

If Web2.0 is today’s equivalent of the early 20th century cultural pool… Is Google’s mission statement and attitude the contemporary equivalent of Warburg’s project? Gmail would hold the KWB’s diary and internal correspondence; Warburg’s articles would be published on blogger.com; the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne would be based on Flickr and presented through Slideshare to a captive audience on Facebook. Bing and Saxl would be working at the Googleplex. If Aby himself was alive today, he would be Google.
© 2008 Ayssar Arida www.quantumcity.com | ayssar@quantumcity.com